Footprints on the Moon was originally
broadcast on Quantum on
ABC TV . This
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The moon has had a special
fascination for us for millenia

Frank Borman:
"This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon. I think
that each one of us carries his own impression of what he sees
today. I know my own impression is that it's a vast, lonely,
forbidding expanse of nothing. And it certainly would not appear
to be a very inviting place to live or work."

Quantum: If
that comment from Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman was the
reality, if the moon was just as he described it; "just a
vast expanse of nothing", then what was the fascination of
going to the moon at all? Why spend 10 years burning up the
energies of half a million people? Why use up massive resources,
dollars and roubles, and why sacrifice human lives in the race to
reach the moon, only to seemingly abandon interest after three
and a half years of manned lunar landings.

Picture from George Melies' film
about travelling to the moon

For the answers,
we've got to look back long before Neil Armstrong's
"One small step for a man".

Even to our
ancestors, the moon held a special fascination. Sometimes
supernatural and mystical, sometimes merely romantic, but always
influential. The moon's hold over us is very real. Its
phases shape the calendar and control the tides. But although it
appears so close, it has remained tantalisingly beyond reach.
Like George Méliès' 1902 film, we can only
fantasise about going there, and guess wildly about what we might
find.

Sputnik - the first artificial
satellite - launched the Space Race

No sooner were the
first aeroplanes shakily reaching for the sky than pioneers like
Robert Goddard were seriously planning how to reach the
moon.

Newsreader: "The first
artificial Earth satellite in the world..."

Quantum: With
the Launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the race for the moon was on in
earnest, but curiosity wasn't the only motive. The Cold War
had made the Russians and Americans fiercely competitive. And in
the West, the Soviet success caused some panic.

Woman: "I guess the
American people are alarmed that a foreign country especially an
enemy country, can do this. We fear this. We fear that they have
something out there that the majority of the people don't
know about. "

Man:
"...definitely alarmed."

Journalist:
"What do you think about America not being able to do the
same?"

Man:
"Well, if I was in military service and fell down on the job
like that I could stand a court martial. "

Yuri Gagarin (L) - first man in
space, with Sergei Korolev

Quantum:
Spurred on my its early technical achievements with Sputnik, and
the inspiration of chief designer, Sergei Korolev, the Russians
chalked-up a staggering number of firsts in space.

Man: "My first
reaction, I believe, is the normal reaction of every American.
I'm disappointed."

Journalist:
"We can see the ignition. The rocket is beginning to rise,
agonisingly slowly. The Astronaut has turned on his clocks, and
here we go. We're on our way into space with Alan B.
Shepherd. I'll join you in just a second on another
microphone. "

President Kennedy announces the
program to put a man on the moon

Quantum:
Unwittingly, the Soviet supremacy had stunned the pride of the
richest nation in the world. Less than 3 weeks after Alan
Shepherd became America's first man in space, President
Kennedy threw down the gauntlet.

John F Kennedy: "I
believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the
goal before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in
this period will more impressive to Mankind or more important for
the long range exploration of space. "

John Glenn's first
spaceflight

Quantum:
It's difficult for us now to realise how incredibly ambitious
that goal must have seemed in May of 1961, when America had
clocked-up only 15 minutes of manned space travel.

Mission Control: "The
clock is operating, we're under way. "

Astronaut John
Glenn: "Oh, that view is tremendous."

Mission
Control: "Roger 7, you have a go at least 7
orbits."

Quantum: As
the race intensified, both sides now blasted men into orbit at a
dizzying rate - staging one space spectacular after another. In
the meantime, over 30 unmanned robot vehicles were rocketed to
the moon. But it was too far, too fast. The year 1967 struck
crushing blows to both superpowers.

Quantum:
Then in Russia, veteran cosmonaut, Vladimir Komoroff was killed
when his new Soyuz spacecraft plunged to Earth, its parachute
hopelessly tangled.Just months before, Russia's chief designer,
Korolev and his deputy had died unexpectedly. For the Soviets,
the setbacks were too great. The race to put a man in the moon
was over. They concentrated instead on developing unmanned lunar
vehicles.This
left a way open for the Americans to take the 'one giant leap
for mankind'.

And as the big event drew near, in
July 1969, moon madness set in around the world.

For the American
people, the astronauts and their spacecraft embodied once again
the pioneering spirit. But behind the scenes, scientists had
their own expectations - ones which they hoped might shed light
on the moon's origin.

The legs of the lunar lander were
too frail to sustain its weight on Earth, but worked fine on the
moon

This grainy black and white TV image
of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon stopped
the world in 1969

Quantum: At the last minute
of the lunar descent, module pilot Buzz Aldrin had to manoeuvre
the Eagle away from a crater full of large boulders. As a result,
Mission Control never got an exact fix on their location in the
Sea of Tranquillity.

Buzz Aldrin:
"Forward, Forward 40 feet, down two and a half. Picking up some
dust, big shadow 4 forward, drifting to the right a
little."

Mission
Control: "30 seconds"

Buzz Aldrin:
"Contact light. OK engines stop."

Mission
Control: "We copy you down Eagle."

Neil
Armstrong: "Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has
landed."

Mission
Control: "Roger Tranquillity. We copy you on the ground
You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're
breathing again. Thanks a lot."

Neil
Armstrong: "Very very fine grained as you get close to it.
It's almost like a powder. Down there it's very
fine."

"I'm now I'm going to step
off the LM that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap
for Mankind."

Quantum: And
it was, in fact, an Australian facility that allowed Mission
Control and the world to see these momentous images.

Buzz Aldrin:
"It's a very simple matter to hop down from one step to the
next."

Neil
Armstrong: "You've got three more."

Dish at Honeysuckle Creek used to
communicate with lunar missions

Quantum: The
pictures were received by the NASA Tracking Station at
Honeysuckle Creek in the ACT, and from there they were relayed to
Houston. The Honeysuckle Creek Station was one of a dozen or so
tracking stations around the globe. In Australia, it was
supported by dishes at nearby Tidbinbilla and Parkes. Tidbinbilla
had been planned as the major link. But at the 11th hour, things
went wrong.

Australian Engineer: The
transmitter supplied to Tidbinbilla blew up before the mission
started, and despite the fact that the engineers repaired it very
quickly, the managers at Houston decided to switch the support of
the lunar module from Tidbinbilla to Honeysuckle.

Laser Reflector left on the moon by
the Apollo Astronauts

Quantum:
Unconcerned by Earth-bound problems, Armstrong and Aldrin
unfurled the Stars and Stripes, took a phone call from the
President, and then began the serious work.

Some distance from
the Eagle, a solar-powered seismometer was placed on the surface
to record moonquakes. A valuable method of determining the
structure of the moon's interior.Then, Aldrin set up a laser reflector - a
cluster of tiny prisms designed to reflect light from laser beams
directed onto it from Earth. The time taken for a laser pulse to
travel there and back is used to measure the moon's distance
from the Earth. It's accurate to the nearest 2 centimetres.
And we now know that the moon is actually pulling away from us
very slowly.

But the most
important job to the gathering of rock and soil samples. The two
men collected rocks that weighed 22 kilograms back on Earth; the
most expensive geological specimens ever obtained.

The study of these
rocks and others from later Apollo missions was to involve a
prominent Australian geochemist.Dr Stuart Ross-Taylor, of the Australian
National University, was invited by NASA to run the chemical
analysis section of the newly created Lunar Receiving Laboratory
at Houston. He was to be the first scientist to analyse the moon
rock samples being brought back by Armstrong and
Aldrin.

Dr. Stuart Ross-Taylor was one of the first
people on earth to analyse moon rock

NASA had installed
an optical emission spectrograph. At that time, the
state-of-the-art machine for analysing even tiny fragments of
rock; a technique with which Dr Taylor was very
familiar.

Dr Taylor: NASA installed
this equipment because it wasn't clear how much material was
coming back. Perhaps only a handful of samples might be grabbed
in a quick mission.

Samples returned from the first three moon
landings were kept in strict quarantine

Quantum:
After eight exhausting days in space now came the laborious
safety precautions designed to ensure that no organisms, harmful
or otherwise, were brought back from the moon and released on an
unsuspecting world. This meant quarantining the astronauts and
their sealed boxes of lunar rocks and soil.

Naturally, the
scientists were eager to see what they'd brought back. What
might they reveal about the origin of the moon and our own
world?

Dr Taylor: We received the
samples at about Noon on July the 28th, and there was a press
conference at 4 o'clock when we had to put out the first
results. And this was rather traumatic, since the results had to
be correct.

Quantum: Were
you able to give them any results?

Dr Taylor: Oh
yes, yes. And they were correct!

Photographic plate produced from
mass spectrographic analysis of moon rock

Quantum:
These initial results confirmed that the lunar rocks were borne
in great heat, and were more ancient than all but the oldest
rocks on Earth.
20 years on, the analysis continues. The technology has been
updated, but the steps are basically the same.A small piece of moon rocks is
pulverised, then mixed with graphite and shaped into a pellet
that resembles a pencil lead. That pellet is then put into a mass
spectrometer and analysed. The photographic plate that results
bears the encoded signatures of every element that's present
in the sample.

Dr Taylor: In this case, we
can see here a line due to Uranium 238, Thorium 232, some lead
isotopes there...

Quantum: Dr
Taylor's findings have made an important contribution to what
we know about the moon. Years after the samples were collected,
scientists are finally in a position to comment with some
certainty about the moon's spectacular origins.

Three main theories
have been proposed to explain how the moon began. But since the
moon landing, only one of them, the so-called Giant Impact
Theory, has survived intact

It's based on a
new understanding of the chemistry of lunar rocks, coupled with
an awareness of the moon's internal structure and it's
strange orbit. Above all, it explains why the Earth and the moon
together spin faster than any other planet in the solar
system.

Dr Taylor: The only way to
do that was to give the system a big kick. And the only way to
give it a big kick was to hit the Earth with something very big,
like the size of Mars, about a tenth of the mass of the
Earth.

Quantum: The
story goes that eons ago, when the solar system was forming, huge
chunks of molten rock orbited the sun, along with the larger
proto-planets themselves. Collisions were inevitable. In fact,
according to the theory, they played a crucial part in the
formation of the planets as they are today.

Dr Taylor: The most
dramatic piece of evidence is Uranus which is a very large
gaseous planet, it's lying on its side with it's pole
tilted at the sun, with it's satellites in equatorial orbit
around it. It's been knocked over, and it takes an
Earth-sized object to do that for Uranus.

For Venus, Venus is
unique, it's rotating slowly backwards. And the only rational
way to do this is to hit with a very large, probably Mars-sized
object. It's stopped in its tracks and started to spin
backwards.

Cray supercomputers were once the most powerful
computers on the planet - and they came with a free
couch!

Quantum: In
1987, American astrophysicists, Willy Benz, Wayne Slattery and Al
Cameron, working from the Los Alamos National Laboratory,
reported that they had simulated the ancient impact that may have
formed the moon, on a Cray Supercomputer. The trick was to work
out at what speeds the two bodies would have to have been
travelling.

This is how they saw
the events. About 4.6 billion years ago, the proto-Earth and a
smaller size planetesimal approached each other, both had iron
cores and surrounding mantles of granite. The proto-Earth's
gravity pulled the impactor towards it, and the collision
occurred. The Titanic shock of the impact jetted out fiery
debris. A ball of molten iron wrapped in a mantle of glowing
granite. But the iron core separated and plunged back into the
Earth leaving behind it an orbiting proto-moon made almost
entirely of granite.

This Los Alamos
computer modelling claims to be accurate on a number of points.
It produces a mathematical moon that has the same mass, size,
orbit and chemical composition as the real moon. What's more,
it fits very well the actual data that Apollo brought back from
the moon.

Dr Stuart Ross-Taylor, ANU

Dr Taylor: It's
interesting that as a result of this catastrophic collision which
took place in a few minutes, four and a half billion years ago,
we not only produced the moon but the Earth gets tilted on its
axis, you know, it has a 23 degree tilt from the plane of the
ecliptic, which of course, gives us the seasons. So this single
chance event produces the moon, it alters the chemistry of the
Earth's rocky mantle and it provides for the coming of Spring
and Autumn and so on as well - all of which are the result of a
chance encounter four and a half billion years ago.

Quantum:
Without the moon missions and the rocks they brought back,
it's unlikely we would ever have has the strong evidence to
support this theory.

And the Russians
made a contribution too. Although they abandoned their manned
missions, after many attempts, the Soviets finally succeeded with
automated soil sample return mission, and unmanned lunar rovers.
Their performance was impressive, but the Apollo missions proved
a far more bountiful source of material.

After Apollo 11,
nine more missions were on the drawing board, but only 5 were
completed.

Astronauts took short 'hops'
to walk on the surface of the moon.

Astronaut: " I was
strolling on the moon one day. In the very merry month of
December"

Astronaut 2:
"May"

Quantum:
There were also long-term plans for a moon base. But President
Nixon baulked at the cost. And when Apollo 17 blasted its way
back to Earth, the dream of a permanent presence on the moon
faded.

Above The crew of Apollo 11
(L to R)
Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong.Below Lunar Module returning from
the Moon

30 years on, the
moon is once again out of reach - neither the Russians nor the
Americans have the hardware to get there. The giant Saturn
rockets were scrapped years ago. And the shuttle is incapable of
leaving Earth orbit. All that remains are the memories of the
first astronauts.

Neil Armstrong: "The
touchdown itself, from my point of view was a real high in terms
of elation. Not so much for the instant, but because it marked
the achievement that a third of a million people had been working
for a decade to accomplish."

Buzz Aldrin:
"The fact that we could respond so rapidly in an 8-year period
from a challenge to do something that was very nebulously
understood, to be able to achieve it, it seems to projections now
seem to take a good bit longer, so catching up would be more
difficult. So I think leadership is one where we need to be on
the cutting-edge to be able to do what we choose to do in the
future."

Michael
Collins: "I remember most vividly the picture of the lunar
horizon and then the LEM ascent stage in the foreground with
these two guys in it, and then the Earth popping up at that
instant. So you have all three lined up. You've got 3 billion
people over there, two people here and that's it."

Footprints on the Moon
was a special report for Quantum.The reporter was Geoffrey Burchfield and the producer
was Harvey Broadbent.